VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vmware converter’

John Troyer from VMTN has hosted the first podcast episode of VMware Communities Roundtable and has posted a summary of the call notes at VMware Communities Roundtable podcast #1 | VMTN Blog. I am honored to have one of my “things that make you go hmmmm” (on the Quick Migration vs VMotion discussion) posts listed as a reference for one of the topics of the episode.

John announces the new series and the objective of the Roundtable podcasts with the following summary:

“Each week, we’ll bring together experts and leaders from the VMware Communities and virtualization blogs to discuss the interesting topics in virtualization. Think of this as if it were a group meeting up at VMworld over a pint to chat about the latest news.”

The episode lasts somewhere between 50 minutes to an hour and is a recorded call between John and an attendee list consisting of some of the virtualization community’s top minds from all over the world. VMware Community profiles of the individuals contributing to episode 1 are:

• Steve Beaver – sbeaver
• Tom Howarth
• Alex Mittell – mittell
• Eric Siebert – esiebert7625
• Edward Haletky -Texiwill
• Dave Mishchenko

Go to John’s VMTN post to listen or download the podcast, but the following is my quick summary and take-aways from the call. Read the rest of this entry »

I was helping a customer P2V a large development SQL server this week and ran into a VMFS configuration issue that failed the conversion. We were using the Converter Enterprise for VirtualCenter 2.5 plugin. Almost as soon as we kicked off the job it failed with an error starting with “file size is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore”. The VMFS LUN we were using as the target was an empty 1.5 TB volume, and the new VM consisted of 2 virtual disks that totaled roughly 450 GB. We had plenty of room, but the problem was not the available storage space. Instead, the issue was that we exceeded the maximum possible .vmdk size for the default VMFS 1MB block setting.

When you add new storage to an ESX host and you format the LUN with the VMFS file system you have to choose what block size setting you want to use. See the screenshot for the dropdown box used to make this choice. Notice the Maximum file size description supposedly provided to help you understand this setting. It’s hardly intuitive in my opinion, so let me try to translate – Choosing the block size determines what maximum possible .vmdk size can be created on this LUN.

If you do not change the default setting when you format a VMFS LUN
Read the rest of this entry »

Carlo Costanzo over at ipmer.com has a great post about how to quickly and easily solve issues resulting from VM snapshots. As Carlo points out, too many administrators misunderstand the ESX snapshot to be a point in time backup and unfortunately do not realize it is instead a live and growing file. More often than not the snapshot is forgotten until the LUN is completely out of space at which time the VM is unstable. Trying to commit the snapshot becomes a time consuming burden.

The post 70GB Snapshot, YIKES! explains how Carlo used some “outside of the box” thinking to use VMware Converter to rescue VMs without going through the commit process. The idea is so simple it’s brilliant! Carlo writes:

Read the rest of this entry »

I ended up with a Toyota Prius as my rental car for the week in San Diego. I’ve never driven a Prius before, and honestly, I’ve never really had an interest in the car until now. Like most, I knew that the Prius uses a Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD) engine, but I had no idea about all the cool technology built into making the car so efficient. As a matter of fact, the Prius engine technology is in some ways similar to the Distributed Resource Scheduling and Power Management features of VI3 Enterprise.

According to wikipedia’s page about the HSD: Read the rest of this entry »

When I hear “we only have 6 servers so our migration to VI should be quick and easy, right?” I hesitate. Not because it can’t be done, but because of how it should be done and the probable challenges. The expectation is usually that the physical servers should be virtualized as is. The reality is often that in order to achieve the best VI design the customer needs to separate applications and services.

A typical small office server infrastructure is usually similar to the following:

The exact placement of the different applications and services varies, but the result is the same. A small company P2V project really should be an infrastructure redesign project so that the features and benefits of VI can be fully leveraged. The following are my recommendations for the VI design of a small company like the example. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the major disadvantages of VMware Converter is that you do not have the option to choose how many virtual cpus (vCPU) your new VM will have. If your source physical server has 2 CPU sockets your target VM will end up with 2 vCPUs. If your source server’s CPUs are dual core your target VM ends up with 4 vCPUs. It’s a well known best practice to minimize the number of multi processor VMs in your virtual infrastructure. So, how do you make sure servers that you p2v result in single processor VMs? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the advantages of a virtual infrastructure is the ability to cost effectively replicate your production systems to a secondary disaster recovery environment. Not only can you do this with virtual machines, but there are now several options available to allow physical servers to be replicated to a stand-by VM. This post will briefly cover several products and solutions and provide multiple commercial options and a free alternative. Read the rest of this entry »